Annual water quality monitoring occurs on Liberty Lake by personnel from the Washington State University Department of Natural Resource Sciences under contract with the Liberty Lake Sewer and Water District. The primary purpose of the Liberty Lake monitoring is to provide information to help the community understand lake water quality status, assess trends in lake water quality, and to guide the community and the district in decisions regarding lake and watershed management. Sampling occurs biweekly throughout the growing season (early spring to late fall) and assesses dissolved oxygen, temperature, conductivity, alkalinity, pH, clarity, algae, zooplankton, and nutrients (phosphorus and nitrogen). In addition to the lake monitoring, sampling of the inlet streams (Clarke, Stokke, Kamiakin, and West fork of Liberty Creek) also occurs biweekly by personnel from WSU and the LLSWD.
BiJay Adams, General Manager and past Lake Protection Manager for the Liberty Lake Sewer and Water District, established real time telemetry monitoring stations for Liberty Lake and Creek. Liberty Lake and Creek stilling wells are equipped with pressure transmitters that captures both water temperature and pressure and provides a signal proportional to the magnitude of these parameters. The data are transmitted via radio waves and linked to the world wide web via a radio telemetry modem.
A 6 inch ductile iron stilling well has been installed on Liberty Lake at a private homeowners association park. The purpose for the installation of this site is to monitor the continuous level of Liberty Lake and maintain the level of the lake at or below the 1951 adjudicated level (2049.51 feet above sea level). This stilling well offers real time data valuable for calculating lake volume, evaporation, and residence time, plotting and calculating the rise and fall of the lake level, and pin pointing runoff and storm events. Ongoing monitoring will ensure quality data useful in calculating hydrologic and nutrient budgets while maintaining and establishing baselines and trends. Unlike the remote area of Liberty Creek, this site has direct power through cooperation of Avista Utilities and the homeowners association. Two existing staff gages are on Liberty Lake to correlate to the real time data collected by the telemetry station and to ensure the accuracy of the data being reported.